If there’s such a thing as a front-row seat on history, Albert Repicci has taken it.

Article by Robert Marchant

He’s seen an early moon launch at Cape Canaveral, met the pope, attended President John F. Kennedy’s funeral and watched the impeachment hearings against President Bill Clinton inside the Capitol. He’s also watched tribunals deliver justice to the perpetrators of mass murder in Rwanda and Cambodia.

“I’m a student of historic events,” the Greenwich resident said.

Repicci’s most recent trip was in late April to a courtroom in northern Germany, where prosecutors laid out a criminal case against Oskar Groening, a guard who worked at the Auschwitz death camp.

Repicci, 74, a retired dentist who still works in the field as a volunteer, said his philosophy is simple: “You just have to show up.”

A powerful moment.

In the case of what is likely to be the last trial of a former Nazi ever conducted, Repicci said he felt a strong desire to be inside the court.

“It’s the last opportunity to bear witness to something that happened 70 years ago. To be in the same room as the victim and the accused — that’s a powerful moment. It’s the last chapter, the last accused to go before trial.”

Repicci took a plane to Germany late last month and spent three hours waiting in the cold — he’s a persistent man — before he was allowed to enter the courtroom where Groening, 93, is being tried.

“It was very somber,” he recalled. “Groening sat quietly, stared straight ahead during the whole thing, didn’t show emotion.”

Repicci saw four witnesses, Auschwitz survivors, and he was able to access a translation service for three of the women, natives of Hungary, who spoke in German. Another survivor, who had resettled in Canada, spoke in English. The survivors all referenced the chimneys at Auschwitz and the loss of their family members. “That was the hardest part of the trial,” Repicci said.

The Groening case is a complicated one. The accused, now a frail widower, volunteered for service as a young man with the most fanatic of the Nazi warriors, the Schutzstaffel, or SS.
Deployed to Auschwitz, he worked as an accountant and paymaster.

Groening later requested a transfer and was eventually sent to a combat unit, which surrendered to the British at the end of the war in Europe, the 70th anniversary of which was celebrated Friday.

In later life, as a comfortable executive in the glass industry, Groening was angered by the Holocaust-denial movement, and wrote letters and appeared in documentaries decrying the so-called scholars who tried to deny or minimize the accounts of slaughter at places like Auschwitz.

German law changed several years ago, allowing functionaries like Groening, not just those directly responsible for the killing, to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. At the outset of the trial, Groening said he felt “moral guilt” for his time at the death camp, while leaving open the question of his legal guilt.

The ongoing trial is examining how much time the former SS sergeant spent on the train platforms when new victims arrived, what his duties were and what motivated him to request a transfer to a combat unit. He faces 15 years in prison if convicted.

Common threads

Repicci is deeply interested in human nature and what cases like the Groening trial reveal about behavior in extreme circumstances. He said he sees a common thread in cases of mass murder and genocide.

“In every one of these genocide situations, they all dehumanize the subject, the victim. It makes it easier to kill,” Repicci said, “The other constant theme is the desire to impress superiors; they really want to fulfill expectations.”

Repicci was stirred by the prosecutor in the case, Thomas Walther, and his insistence on using the law to prevent massacres in our own time.

“He wanted the trial to send a message to anyone that if you commit a crime like this, you can be tried 70 years later. He also said (crimes against humanity were) happening again and again and again,” he said.

Repicci, who lives near the water in Riverside, knows a little about German language and history from the time he spent as a young Army dentist stationed in Nuremberg. It is a city that became famous as a showcase for fascist propaganda, as well as the war-crime trials that followed the conflict.

“I’ve always had a fascination with history,” he said, and a special desire to look into the faces of those caught up in great events.
Service to others

But Repicci does more than just collect great moments, watching the pageant of history from the sidelines. The Greenwich dentist is volunteering in Nepal with Medical Ministry International, a Dallas-area nonprofit humanitarian organization.

When he travels to Africa and Asia to see moments of history unfolding, he brings along the tools of his trade.

Sure, he enjoys tennis, golf and sailing, and he’s enraptured by his 1-year-old granddaughter.

“But there’s only so much golf a man can play,” Repicci said, and that’s what drives him to difficult and dangerous places around the world. The appealing aspect of dentistry, he said, is the quick results it can bring to people who have been suffering from dental disease and tooth troubles.

“To feel as though you’ve done something good for someone — yes,” he said. “And there’s travel, adventure, learning another culture, it really opens up a whole new world.”

The grandfather is also a playwright. His drama, “Honor Bound,” about lost friendship, was produced off-Broadway last year.

“I’m an English major who went into the sciences,” he joked.

Professionals like the Greenwich dentist are sought after in the world of humanitarian relief. The chief executive officer of Medical Ministry International, Sam Smith, knew of Repicci only by name, but he said he fit the profile of the kind of professionals who raise their hands to volunteer in disaster zones like earthquake-ravaged Nepal.

“They all have a passion to help the less fortunate,” Smith said. “They realize they’ve been blessed with a gift, and they want to help use that gift to help others, that’s a common thread.”

As Repicci would say, whether to bear witness to suffering or to alleviate it, there’s nothing like being there.

Robert.Marchant@scni.com